"Meek's Cutoff" (2010)

Kelly Reichardt should continue to make films with a seven-figure budget. Why? Her pacing (she edits her own films), her sense of composition, her shot selection, her sense of place. She is a mature filmmaker who has consistently disavowed the bullshit quirkiness of the american "indie" scene -- and her ability to construct atmosphere recalls those other two great americans: Terrence Malick and P.T. Anderson, both of whom she has clearly studied. Yet she has succeeded in following their example without losing her own voice in imitatio. Meek's Cutoff can be viewed alongside Days of Heaven and There Will Be Blood. In this respect, the achievement of Meek's Cutoff could be reduced to a single dictum: westerns can still be made if one pays closer attention to sound and to place, as opposed to story and to character. (But maybe the films of John Ford already mean this to people -- but I confess that I have never been a devoted fan of westerns.) I do not mean that the latter two elements should be totally sacrificed, only that their traditional roles in the western genre can be effectively reduced, while augmenting the existential nature of a scenario that discovers itself precisely when it is most lost in the dilemmas of the present-tense. Meek's Cutoff is a film about the present, which makes no effort at romanticizing or mythologizing the pastness of the past, and for this reason it avoids the retro feel of post-modern westerns (even a recent western as good as The Proposition seems to hold a bit too firmly to its nostalgic, past-loving guns), and instead gives us the sense of living out a brief and wondrous life in an otherworldly, cruel, and thoroughly up-to-date universe.

Yet strangely, this post-genre ruse can prove dangerous, as can be seen in the ending of the film, which leaves much (too much!) to be desired -- which is to say that though Reichardt is not yet a master filmmaker, she is certainly on her passage there (curiously all of her films, this one most especially, work as passages in time that structure a rigorous ordering of being lost in the unknown, on the way toward a kind of hermetic enlightenment that is never fully reached) -- and if the ending falls a little flat for being too premature, the intentionality which is posed at the end evinces, at least, the potential for an even better, a far greater film, one in which the ending comes a half-hour later than it does, after something of a shocking denouement that was developed with piercing deliberation, and leaves the audience gawking in disbelief -- but alas, we must wait for Reichardt's next film to glimpse this possibility.